James Edward Grant’s Angel and the Badman is a fish-out-of-water story about a gunfighter named Quirt Evans (John Wayne) who renounces violence after he is injured and nursed back to health by a pretty Quaker girl named Penelope Worth (Gail Russell) and taken in by her community. Like most Hollywood movies of this sort, Angel and the Badman has its cake and eats it too — it preaches nonviolence, but is still jam-packed with gunfights and fistfights.
The action is fast and furious from the very opening moments of the film, which begins with a close-up of a gun being drawn, the shooter fanning the hammer, firing from right to left, emptying the cylinder, and then running to his horse.
Legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt was the second unit director on this picture, and it shows. There’s a cattle raid sequence that’s among the best I’ve seen, and most of the action is well-staged. There’s one orgy of fistfighting, however, that was so over-the-top that I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be funny or not. By the time the melee was finished, every visible piece of wood in the saloon was in splinters.
Angel and the Badman was John Wayne’s first time as a producer, and it feels like a labor of love. Unfortunately, the direction, cinematography, and pacing of the film aren’t up to the standard of Wayne’s other pictures I’ve seen from the ’40s. The music is especially bad, and is rarely appropriate for the scene it’s accompanying. At its heart, Angel and the Badman is a B picture with an A-list star.
The film ends with a line that could be interpreted as pro gun control — “Only a man who carries a gun ever needs one.” This is a rarity for a western, especially one starring John Wayne, but if you’re a traditional sort, don’t worry; all the bad guys die of lead poisoning before the film is through.
